1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to computer network and, more particularly, methods of and systems for thwarting attacks from remotely located computers.
2. Description of the Related Art
Not too many years ago, an individual might have used one or two computing devices—perhaps one at work and perhaps one at home. Today, individuals use a wide variety of computing devices. For example, it's not uncommon now for an individual to have multiple computers at work, one or more at home (perhaps a desktop computer and a laptop computer), a smart phone (which includes a pocket-sized, fully functional computer), digital cameras (still and video), and one or more tablet computers. In addition, many household appliances in use today also incorporate fully functional computers. Such appliances include televisions, set-top boxes, personal video recorders (PVRs), digital media players, and networked music players.
The multitude of devices used by an individual can be thought as the individual's device-sphere. One of the challenges with maintaining security within one's device-sphere is that failure to block just one out of many thousands or millions of attacks across several devices can have dire consequences. A particularly difficult type of attack to block is a “zero-day” attack, i.e., an attack on a vulnerability before the vulnerability has been discovered by those building anti-virus and other security tools.
What is needed is a way to better protect devices of a user's device-sphere from numerous and even zero-day attacks.